Last week, a few of our staff members were treated to an incredible experience, gaining the opportunity to attend the 2020 Synapse Summit at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida. As a convention for all things entrepreneurial and technological, the Synapse Summit gave our team the chance to take a couple of days to learn more about startup business and city development as a whole in the Tampa area.

Speakers at the event included Jeffrey Vinik, owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Sara Blakely, founder and CEO of Spanx, Jeff Hoffman, founder of Priceline.com, and Steven Currall, president and CEO of the University of South Florida, just to name a few. Each keynote brought a unique perspective to the table about scaling a company, personal growth, and the future of business. Separately from the main stage speakers, smaller breakout sessions took place, with industry experts offering discussions on topics ranging anywhere from trends in healthcare to new advances in military applications.

Out of all the valuable information the Actsoft team received at the Synapse Summit, one of the most crucial things we took away from the event was that the Tampa tech community is truly sprawling, and we’re so proud to be a part of it. Getting a chance to see where many of the industries our mobile workforce management solutions play in are headed was also immensely beneficial, as we plan to take our findings to the drawing board in an effort to continue pushing the boundaries of what our solutions can do.

The Synapse Summit reminded us as a company that the future is brighter than ever, not just for local developments in technology, but more specifically, the future landscape of software as a whole. We’ve returned from it inspired and rejuvenated, ready to provide an application that provides even more return on investment for your mobile workforce.

In one of last week’s blog posts, we discussed some of the difficulties a field service company faced without having a tool to plan out their mobile employees’ work orders in advance. In addition to productivity and brand reputation suffering due to confusions in scheduling, the company was also spending too much money on paper documents to instruct staff that were handwritten and, at times, illegible.

Our flagship workforce management software Encore now enables businesses to manage workloads ahead of time with its Dispatching Scheduler feature. Available exclusively to users of the solution’s Ultimate tier, the Dispatching Scheduler provides an easy, yet intuitive way for your team to plan out customer visits and increase its efficiency.

Features of Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler:

A color-coded dashboard that provides easy identification for work order progress.

The ability to create service delivery windows for employees dispatched to new customer locations.

A feature for reassigning pending orders to new workers on the fly.

Calendar and Schedule rows that display availabilities, last known employee locations, and current assignments.

The ability to see lists of unassigned orders and drag and drop them onto user schedules.

Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler dashboard.

Benefits of Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler:

Distribute workloads more evenly.

Optimize employee schedules for higher efficiency.

Save time and money with intuitive scheduling that helps to keep employees informed.

Provide customers with more accurate service delivery times.

Graphics-based scheduling allows your staff to work faster and more interactively.

When applied to the field service use case, it’s easy to see how this powerful new capability could instantly improve the company’s processes. Encore’s Dispatching Scheduler allowed the business’s mobile employees to have easy access to their daily schedules, eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth communication from the office to the field and giving them a much more accurate timeframe for service deliveries. Due to both an increase in productivity and efficiency with the Dispatching Scheduler, their business was able to save significant revenue and also increase its opportunities from a strengthened reputation amongst its customer base.

These days, technology is constantly and quickly changing. Just when you think you have the coolest device ever, an update comes out. Keeping up with current trends can be a challenge, so choosing the best mobile resource management (MRM) solution geared toward your needs can be a daunting task.

Just as you want the latest technology for personal use, you also want the best solution for your business. While providing the latest and greatest technology to your employees is essential, you also want to select a device or solution that is user-friendly and easy to operate.

Sharing Information Is Key
When selecting a mobile solution for employees, it is important to choose one that allows you to share information and transmit it from the office to the field. There are so many variables to take into consideration when researching and choosing the right application: product training, ease of integration with existing systems, and excellent customer service to support your application.

Sarah Howland, editor-in-chief of Field Technologies magazine, explained this in a real-life example:

“A friend of mine got into a fender bender and after a frustrating time spent with the other party involved and the police officer onsite filling out the accident report, she asked for a copy of it. Having noted during the conversation that the officer’s car was equipped with a rugged laptop computer and mobile printer, she assumed her request was a simple one. However, the officer replied by saying, ‘I can give you my handwritten notes and the incident number, but I don’t know how to work that thing.’”

Want Not, Waste Not
In order to get the most out of your technology, you must explore all of its capabilities and use it on a regular basis. Purchasing an effective technology is only the first step. When you deploy it, you must do so in a way that every user receives effective and adequate training. With workers in the field, logistics can prove to be a challenge. Training on devices can be best achieved via:

In-house methods and modules

Video tutorials

Step-by-step learning manuals

Get the most out of your mobile technology. Research the best technology for your business needs. Train yourself on how to properly use the device. Share information about the product’s capabilities with your team members. Use the product as often as you can. Your MRM solution should not only increase efficiency for your business, but should also be one in which your employees feel comfortable using.

At Actsoft, we take pride in the strategic partnerships we’ve forged with many other industry leaders over the years. They’ve allowed us to construct better avenues to support our dedicated customers, establishing a variety of solutions options that can fulfill the needs of virtually any workforce.

We partner with makers of hardware and additional software solutions alike to bring your team all the tools it needs for increased efficiency, productivity, and savings. The returns our solutions can provide to your business are even more powerful once paired with the additional resources each of our alliances actively offer.

As mentioned in a previous post, the number of parcels being delivered this holiday season is likely to increase from years past. With companies like Amazon making online ordering and residential delivery even more popular, it’s clear that accessibility and convenience are currently as important as ever to the average consumer during their shopping experience.

For companies needing to ship packages, especially around Christmastime, tracking the delivery vehicles is one thing, but if those vehicles become separated from the cargo they’re hauling, product security also becomes jeopardized. Luckily, with Actsoft solutions, your team can gain comprehensive knowledge on where its shipping containers and trailers are, with Alerts for tampering outside of specific hours. Easily attach compatible sensors to the doors of your semi-truck trailers to help keep parcels more secure, as you’ll know precisely when the shipping containers they’re in are opened.

Run a more secure and efficient delivery operation with Asset Tracking that works to keep your administrators informed in near real-time. Our software solutions function in tandem with many different types of tracking hardware to display GPS positions of all your business’s assets, allowing you to choose the devices that are best for your business’s specific trailer types. From the warehouse to the distribution zone, your team can also easily establish digital perimeters with Geofences and receive notifications any time a trailer with valuable cargo enters or exits their boundaries.

Save time and money and provide additional peace of mind to your customers by using Asset Tracking to help verify that the products your business ships remain secure at all times. The stress surrounding holiday season logistics can hurt your company’s reputation and bottom line if left to spiral out of control; make sure the parcels in your delivery vehicles’ trailers are reaching their destinations securely and expediently with our digital tracking solutions.

Reliability is a big part of what we develop our applications for at Actsoft. We place a heavy emphasis on making our solutions ultra-dependable in order to help your business ingrain every feature of them into routine operations for consistent, sustained support that continues to elevate the power of your workforce.

Versatility is another philosophy we’ve made essential to the design process of our solutions. For our customers, having a single application to address many of the challenges associated with managing mobile employees, assets, and vehicles is critically important. Michael Courter, Actsoft’s vice president of product management, knows the value of consolidation and adaptability as two essential traits for our software, and he’s continuously learning about new ways in which they’re improving processes for our clients.

“One of my favorite things to do is to go out and visit with customers. It’s important to see how they are using the product and gain feedback on how we can make things even better,” said Courter. “As part of this, it’s always amazing to see how leveraging Actsoft solutions has made an impact on so many businesses. From using forms to capture information, leveraging GPS Tracking and Job Dispatching to save time and money, or using geofence alerts or other methods of communication throughout the software, companies have transformed how they do business.”

Courter believes in the power of what Actsoft solutions can do for organizations of any size. Through systems integration that provides adaptability to workforces, as well as a suite of features to streamline communication, our products bring dispersed staff closer together and reduce gaps in their teams’ productivity, efficiency, and transparency.

“Implementing technology that connects the office to the field not only saves our customers money,” Courter said. “It also continues to help them truly provide better service in order to gain and retain more of their own customer base.”

With every new innovation we add to our solutions, we’re continuing to make things easier, more efficient, and more connected for your business. And all three of these aspects working together result in a major boost to your company’s bottom line annually, with reductions in costs such as:

Fuel

Managing a cost-conscious workforce isn’t exactly simple, but it’s easier to do with GPS Tracking. Our solutions provide near real-time updates on your fleet vehicles’ activities, allowing you to be notified of any instances of excessive idling or speeding by your drivers. Equipping your vehicles with devices like the Geotab GO9 also remains a great way to integrate Encore, our flagship solution, with intuitive hardware that provides diverse insight on how your vehicles are routinely being operated. When it comes to fleet management, use this tandem of software and hardmount technology to identify and curb costly practices your mobile employees may be unintentionally conducting.

Paper

Antiquated processes like filling out paper documents and manually delivering them can be largely eliminated with Wireless Forms. Our applications provide the tools you need to go completely digital with all of your company’s documentation, helping to reduce potential costs associated with paper usage like errors from manual data entry, high purchasing expenses, and time spent driving paperwork back to the office.

Overtime

Actsoft’s Timekeeping feature gives businesses like yours the ability to clamp down on unnecessary overtime payouts with mobile time-punches. Your remote employees can clock in and out using a smartphone or tablet from our Encore solution’s single integrated portal, allowing them to track start and stop times while working with greater accuracy. Over the course of weeks and years, all those saved minutes from more accurate time-punches can have a sustainable positive impact on your company’s bottom line.

The versatility that our solutions provide is a powerful resource for companies with mobile workforces. By having compatibility with many third-party systems, our Encore solution makes it simple for your team to stay adaptable during daily operations and sync data collected by it* with many of the existing software types your business already uses. Integration between our solution and outside ones is possible with five kinds of API data:

Orders

Historical records of instructions you dispatched to your workforce can be accessed from your Actsoft solution’s API and synced with some third-party systems. Review and integrate past directives issued to your team for quality control, proof of service, and checklist verification purposes.

Past locations of employees, assets, and fleet vehicles can all be called up whenever you need them by accessing the Actsoft API. Sync GPS data with anything from weather maps to Esri GIS systems to better understand your workforce’s resiliency, spatial analytics, and historical dispersion.

Form Data

Using our Encore solution to create custom digital versions of all your company’s documents provides your company with a cleaner, faster, and more cost-effective way to process its information. You can then integrate this data with many alternative software types for simpler, more consolidated storage.

Timesheet Data

QuickBooks and Kronos are a couple examples of solutions that are compatible with Encore’s Timekeeping feature. When your remote employees clock in or out from their mobile devices while in the field, their timesheet information is stored within the Actsoft API, making it easy to be synced. Save time and money by eliminating manual entry entirely while trying to merge payroll or accounting systems with data from Encore.

*API integration is only supported on the Ultimate tier of our Encore solution.

From a perspective of running the most efficient mobile healthcare operation possible, taking advantage of an EVV solution’s feature set is nearly as essential as remaining in regulatory compliance. After all, if you’re paying for an EVV solution, it’s wise to use it for the most possible enhancements to your business, while it helps your team stay in line at the same time. Our EVV solution, offered through Encore Vault, is designed to provide your organization with a treasure trove of features and valuable benefits for upgraded operations, including:

Verification of delivered services

It’s within the acronym, and it’s perhaps the most important aspect of our EVV solution: Verification. An ability to document and save data about patient visits made by your mobile medical staff is crucial for success, and in addition to helping track service quality, it can offer your team greater protection, as well as a dynamic new way to submit information.

Redirecting mobile nurses with ease

For mobile healthcare teams that must make multiple trips to different clients daily, the ability to schedule and reroute staff members on the fly can make things infinitely easier. Encore Vault EVV helps your business save fuel, reach patients quicker during emergency situations, and see the near real-time GPS positions of its personnel during working hours.

Helping eliminate insurance fraud and reducing overbilling

Recorded histories of patient visitations with accompanying location markers can help enhance the quality of your healthcare company’s reputation amongst its clientele by fostering consistency. With our application’s ability to notate precise start and stop times for delivered services, you can also help eliminate falsified claims and boost the accuracy of submitted logs.

The GPS Tracking feature in Encore is a multifaceted tool that uses advanced solutions such as Breadcrumb Trails, Traffic Overlay, and Geofences to provide companies with ways to save. Each of these aspects do this by working to increase efficiency and security even further for businesses that employ a mobile workforce.

Breadcrumb Trails

Past routes that mobile employees have taken to job sites are recorded and presented on Encore’s map through Breadcrumb Trails. Any time a driver travels to a location during working hours, their business vehicle’s position is picked up and archived in the system’s memory. Company supervisors can then go back and review trip histories to enhance accountability and verify job completion.

Traffic Overlay

At the beginning of each work day, administrators in a company’s home office can also use Traffic Overlay to see near real-time congestion patterns on roadways. By identifying the most traffic-heavy routes to job sites prior to travel, companies can help their mobile employees avoid excessive idling, save time and fuel, and reach customer locations faster.

Geofences

Geofences help businesses improve fleet and asset security, employee accountability, and quality control, all at once. These are digital boundaries that can be custom constructed on Encore’s live view map around job sites in the field. Geofences are used in tandem with Alerts to electronically notify managers whenever an asset, employee, or vehicle enters or exits set perimeters, providing an extra layer of surveillance for their valuable equipment. In addition to better theft prevention, geofence monitoring helps organizations ensure that their workers are arriving to and leaving assignment destinations right on schedule.

These three aspects of GPS Tracking in Encore give companies like yours even more ways to save time and money. Through providing increased detail about your workforce’s daily routine, Breadcrumb Trails, Traffic Overlay, and Geofences can help you run a more effective operation.

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